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Gaza deaths cast shadow on ceasefire efforts

(reuters)
- Israeli fire hit a house in the Gaza Strip on Monday while a family was
eating breakfast, killing six Palestinians, including four children and their
mother, residents and medical officials said.

"They have wiped out my family," said the
children's father, Ahmed Abu Meateq, putting his hands on his head in despair
and weeping as the bodies were prepared for burial.

The Israeli army said aircraft fired at two Palestinian
militants near the house who were carrying bags.

Based on the size of the resulting explosion, the army said
it now believed that those bags were filled with bombs and other explosive
devices.

"As a result of this big explosion, extensive damage
was caused to a house that was near the gunmen and uninvolved civilians were
hit," the army said in a statement.

The deaths in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun cast
another shadow over Egyptian efforts to forge a ceasefire between Israel and
militant groups and end violence threatening U.S.-brokered Palestinian
statehood talks.

"This aggression does not serve efforts being exerted
to achieve calm, and it obstructs the peace process," Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas, referring to Israel's military activities, said in a
statement carried by WAFA news agency.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, without giving details
of the raid in Beit Hanoun, said Hamas Islamists controlling the Gaza Strip
bore overall responsibility for casualties among non-combatants because gunmen
"operated among civilians".

Medical officials and residents of Beit Hanoun, an area
where militants frequently fire rockets at Israel, said an Israeli projectile
smashed through the ceiling of a one-storey house where a family was having
breakfast.

They said four children -- siblings whose ages ranged from
1-1/2 to 5 years old -- and their mother were killed in the house during what
the Israeli military described as an operation against rocket launching crews
and snipers.

"They were eating and they were hit," a neighbour
said at the site, where chickens pecked at a bloodstained floor and cooked
potatoes grew cold in a pot.

A 17-year-old Palestinian civilian who was passing by the
home was also killed in the explosion, medical workers said.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert, called the death of the family a "tragic incident".

"We make every possible effort to prevent civilians
from being caught in the crossfire," Regev said.

Separately, Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian gunman
from Islamic Jihad during fighting in the town, the group said.

Another Palestinian militant was shot dead later in the day,
according medical workers.

MISSILES, SHELLS

The Israeli military said aircraft and a tank unit fired at
groups of gunmen that tried to approach troops in the town but no houses were
targeted.

Hamas's armed wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades, said
it fired three rockets at the Israeli border town of Sderot in response to the
Beit Hanoun killings. There were no reports of casualties in Sderot.

Hamas described deaths in Beit Hanoun as a "war
crime". The group has offered Israel a six-month truce if it lifted an
embargo on the territory.

After the latest violence, leaders of the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Resistance Committees and the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine travelled from Gaza to Cairo
for talks with Egyptian intelligence officials on a possible ceasefire with
Israel.

Israel has balked
at entering into a formal agreement with Hamas, which is officially committed
to its destruction, but has said it would have no reason to attack in the Gaza
Strip if Palestinians stopped their rocket fire.